I know I’m joining the conversation late, but I have just finished Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann and thoroughly enjoyed it. There are many discussions of this book and this YouTube interview from 2023 with the author, is a good place to start.

In this post, I am going to talk about the final topic in the last chapter, Doing the Right Thing which begins with a preamble about systems and their intended and unintended consequences before moving on to Predictive Analytics, Bias and discrimination, Responsibility and accountability before arriving at Privacy and Tracking and it was the outstanding writing on this issue that will stay with me. The first sentence is quoted in full below:

As a thought experiment, try replacing the word data with surveillance, and observe if common phrases still sound so good.

The author then goes on to provide sentences which will be familiar with Software Developers or anyone working with data:

In our surveillance-driven organisation we collect real-time surveillance streams and store them in our surveillance warehouse.

and

Our surveillance scientists use advanced analytics and surveillance processing in order to derive new insights.

In the final example, the author sublimely includes the title of the book in the experiment and Designing Surveillance-Intensive Applications underlines the point he is making.

I can’t praise this book enough I hope this post has given you a tiny sample of the innovative writing the author uses throughout.